Many happy returns for Google

    You know your company's done well for itself when its name gets a dictionary entry, to 'google' something is now accepted English and it was first heard just ten years ago. In September 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. with four computers and a working capital of 100,000 dollars. Now both of them are worth billions - the world's richest people under forty - and the company made a net profit of almost 900 million euros in the second quarter of this year (the first quarter was even more profitable – even Google is feeling the pinch). From the humble garage beginnings which are almost obligatory for hi-tech companies to nineteen thousand employees in offices all over the world and a dominance of computer searches and advertising that even has Microsoft worried.

    It's not all been plain sailing with criticism aimed at the company for its retention of what could be sensitive information about the 650 million people who make use of its search engine (Google have just announced that from now on they will only keep search histories for nine months), concerns about the company monopolising internet searches thus controlling the flow of internet traffic and advertising and the scandal of the 'Great Firewall of China' when Google bowed to allow Chinese government censorship of its searches – at the time a search for Tiananmen in Google would not bring up references to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

    Now you can walk the streets of the U.S.A., Australia, Japan or France with Google's Street View, look for your swimming pool with Google Earth, see supernovae and galaxies forming with Google Space, watch videos of just about anything you can imagine and a lot more you could never imagine on Youtube. You can now even browse the internet with Google's new web browser 'Chrome', a minimal design that remembers where you go and what you search for (if you want it to) to make browsing an intuitive experience although I always find it disconcerting when my computer seems to know what I'm thinking about.

    And the future? Google on a phone, or any other mobile device that can connect to the internet, near you soon, and on your internet connected TV, fridge, dishwasher… With Apple's 3G I-Phone, with built in GPS and an accelerometer, and Google Street View the view turns as you do, detecting your movements and moving the scene on the phone screen to correspond, highlighting shops or whatever you might be looking for. Or you could just look up and see it for real.